1. Technical Field
Example embodiments of the present invention relate in general to augmented reality services, and more specifically, to a method for providing augmented reality services and a user terminal and access point using the same.
2. Related Art
In recent years, the use of a smart phone that combines the advantages of a mobile phone and a personal digital assistant (PDA) has been increasing. The smart phone combines a basic mobile phone function and a data communication function to provide a variety of application programs such as games, e-mails, wake-up calls, MP3, scheduling, a digital camera, multimedia messaging, wireless Internet services, and the like.
The rapid spread of such a smart phone has accelerated commercialization of augmented reality (AR). AR technology complements the real world with the virtual world to provide a virtual environment created using computer graphics that contains additional information about the real environment, which is the main environment.
AR technology augments the real world viewed through the eyes of a user with additional information about the real world by combining the viewed real world with a virtual world and showing the result as an image. A closely related concept is mixed reality (MR).
In the past, as a method for receiving information about peripheral devices or peripheral objects for AR services, a method of using a centralized database of a previously established specific server has been used.
That is, a user desiring to receive the AR services may send, to an AR service provider, a service request including information such as his or her position or viewing direction. The AR service provider may compare position or viewing direction information of a service user with information of objects stored in the database, and transmit matching information to a service user terminal. In an AR application that has acquired the transmitted matching information, AR services may be provided in such a manner that additional information, in addition to images of peripheral objects, is visually displayed on a screen viewed by a user. Accordingly, users desiring to use existing AR services should be able to access the Internet using a mobile communication network (for example, 3G data communication or LTE data communication) or a wireless local area network (WLAN).
In addition, in this process, AR users should transmit privacy-related information such as their positions or viewing directions to the AR service provider. That is, there are disadvantages regarding Internet access and privacy protection.
In addition, in order to provide services through the centralized database, a large number of pieces of information about objects (for example, a store's name, information about services or articles being sold, and the like) have to be collected, and an advertiser may generally provide this information together with positions associated with the services.
However, when the information becomes inaccurate or obsolete for any of various reasons, post-processing to delete the inaccurate or obsolete information or update information about state changes is required.
However, when the advertiser neglects this duty and does not perform post-processing, there arises a problem in that inaccurate information remains in the database to be provided to AR service users.
Accordingly, to update this information in real-time and provide up-to-date information to service users may incur additional management costs for the service provider.
In addition, a method of using services through AR has another disadvantage of it being difficult to accurately recognize an object when a density of devices around a user is high, or when objects overlap along the user's line of sight.